Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) and Social Media can play an integral part in getting more people from your customer base to visit your website. This in turn will help to meet the business objective of the site, such as generating more enquiries or raising public awareness of a cause or issue. SEO is about optimising your website in the eyes of search engines, particularly Google (which in the UK owns approx. 91% of the search engine market). This ensures your site appears higher up the listings in search engine results.

Using social media with the right strategy can have a considerable impact on brand awareness. We saw this happen for one of our clients, Board Game Extras, where their online brand presence grew considerably over their first year of using social media. As part of an in-depth analysis we undertook in tracking the impact of their digital marketing activities, we saw two significant factors in Google Analytics that hinted at an increase in awareness of their brand name.

Hashtags (#tags) are best known for their use on Twitter as a way of joining up conversations about a particular subject across many different Twitter feeds. #Tags signpost content for other members so that they can easily view content they are interested in. Other social media platforms also use #tags in a similar way. Using #tags can create opportunities for businesses and organisations through:

Social media is often hyped in the news as a way for businesses to generate a quick return. In our experience, however, engaging with social media delivers more benefit in the medium to long term. In fact, over time, social media can be having a positive impact on your business that you may not even be aware of.

It is key to know whether your social media activities are working to be able to further develop your online marketing strategy. It is perhaps not always immediately obvious that these types of activities are working, even though social media is supposedly all about engagement. Most people will read posts but not necessarily respond back with comments (although hopefully you are at least getting a few good comments back on the social media platforms you are using). The good news is that there are a number of tools available to help you really understand whether you are engaging with your online audience.

When planning your marketing strategy, think about combining online marketing activities with more traditional offline activities.  Digital tools such as social media and the Google marketing tools should form part of the overall marketing mix. Many marketing gurus say you should have six to ten marketing channels to keep generating leads and to avoid being over reliant on a single form of marketing. Digital marketing channels offer many extra opportunities for engagement with your audience.

Reach the right person

Sometimes it can be difficult to find and contact the person in an organisation most relevant to you. LinkedIn can help you reach the right people. For example, connections can potentially introduce you to people you would like to speak to. These might be second degree connections in LinkedIn. Alternatively they might be people who are not using LinkedIn but who work in the same organisation as someone you would like to contact. Your connection may be happy to pass on your contact details to their colleague. They may pass on a recommendation too – personal recommendations are always more powerful.